Every night Lucy would ask her mother to read a Julia Donaldson picture book to her. Room on the Broom and Stick Man are a feature of modern childhood, but it is only now that I realise how much each plot is about the search for the comfort of family: “Is there room on the broom for a dog/frog/bird

The current fuss about who should be featured on the pages of the British passport overlooked, as she is always overlooked, one of our great unsung heroes. A woman who makes me proud every day, and never more so than when I go abroad. She is Caroline Haslett, godmother of the British Standard 1363

As the sun set over a lake in Tanzania, a group of remote tribal villagers observed the strange antics of a Western male visitor. He was upside down, his back leaning against a rock, and having a bad attack of second thoughts. Jeff Leach had just “inserted a turkey baster into my bum and injected

I admire the folk art of official school photos. There is dread in them: the mottled backdrops and cardboard frames used to symbolise “innocent promise” in every police drama about missing children. But more often they are pure comedy. If only I knew what the photographer’s trick is — flatten the

We don’t want to die. I don’t want to die. That’s the fear running through every shag, “new you” fitness plan and scribbled graffiti us mortals ever attempted. I think it’s also why I find Rudi Westendorp so fantastically rude. It is first thing in the morning and, OK, I could have done with a lick

Isn’t it ironic? What? You listened to Alanis Morissette all the way through the 1990s, desperate for answers to your deepest life questions, and now, two decades later, she goes and starts a self-help podcast. I’m not sure that’s ironic, that’s just one event happening after another event.

British people, as a rule, hate to haggle. To watch a British person at a Moroccan rug stall at a bazaar is to see culture clash at its most tiresome. No, they do not want to offer “best price”, they don’t want a chat with your cousin about the price, they don’t want to sit and have a mint tea to

Squint your eyes and this church hall could be the 1940s, with the do-gooders of the parish assembling to take an evacuated child. The place is packed, a hundred seated, with more standing at the back. Urgency is in the air, a sense that we British have a race memory of this and are responding as

Ever since she was a girl the Queen has loved her corgis. She feeds them herself, she walks them, she even took one with her in her carriage as she went on her honeymoon. What is less well known is her love for her labradors — a devotion so intense that it is said to have prompted her to make an

As the nights grow colder, so we begin the British parent’s long dark swimming lesson of the soul. The winter swimming class season: Dante’s Inferno, except the rings of hell are rubber, not fiery. Purgatory for me is a changing room with row after row of damp children’s legs, upon which I must